What do you think?
Rate this book
Eric Hoffer: The Longshoreman Philosopher (Hoover Institution Press Publication)
Drawn from Eric Hoffer's private papers as well as interviews with those who knew him, this detailed biography paints a picture of a truly original American thinker and writer. Author Tom Bethell interviewed Hoffer in the years just before his death, and his meticulous accounts of those meetings offer new insights into the man known as the "Longshoreman Philosopher."
328 pages, Hardcover
First published March 25, 2011
35 people are currently reading
137 people want to read
About the author
Tom Bethell
16 books13 followersTom Bethell is a senior editor at the American Spectator. He has contributed to many publications, including the New York Times magazine, Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Crisis, and National Review. He writes often on science. Tom Wolfe has called Bethell “one of our most brilliant essayists.”
Bethell was born and raised in England and graduated from Oxford University in 1962 with a degree in philosophy, physiology, and psychology. He lives in Washington, D.C.
Bethell was born and raised in England and graduated from Oxford University in 1962 with a degree in philosophy, physiology, and psychology. He lives in Washington, D.C.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
April 25, 2016
Excellent Biography...
Although sketchy at times, this biography of Eric Hoffer is excellent reading. Bethell not only covers Hoffer's life, he discusses much of his philosophy. Overall enjoyable read...
Although sketchy at times, this biography of Eric Hoffer is excellent reading. Bethell not only covers Hoffer's life, he discusses much of his philosophy. Overall enjoyable read...
June 25, 2021
A really excellent biography that reminds one not take things so seriously and to view things with a perspective that is not found anymore:
“Man staggers through life yapped at by his reason, pulled and shoved by his appetites, whispered to by fears, beckoned by hopes. Small wonder that what he craves most is self-forgetting.”
― Eric Hoffer
Definitely plan on reading more by Hoffer rather than just The True Believer.
“Man staggers through life yapped at by his reason, pulled and shoved by his appetites, whispered to by fears, beckoned by hopes. Small wonder that what he craves most is self-forgetting.”
― Eric Hoffer
Definitely plan on reading more by Hoffer rather than just The True Believer.
February 20, 2014
An excellent biography. I never did buy Hoffer's explanation of his background.
January 22, 2018
Interesting book that looks at Eric Hoffer's life and writings. The mystery of Hoffer's childhood is discussed but not solved.
February 13, 2025
Having come across an essay where Erich Fromm was confused with his contemporary, and fellow postwar intellectual, once influential, now largely forgotten, German-American Eric Hoffer as to the "true believer" term, I decided to look into the latter. Bethell clearly sets out Hoffer's strengths--the aphorisms, the concision, the range of ideas distilled into readable, accessible, pithy statements.
And the tendency to over-reach, to under-explain, and to fudge subtleties. Even the title of his 1951 debut book's far more about the nature of mass movements (its subtitle) than the title phrase, as Hoffer tended to generalize from his trains of thought, working them over while working on the docks of San Francisco (for arguably a solid income and he got that coveted union job in his mid-forties in the early 1940s only because he had a hernia and couldn't be drafted), rather than push his concepts forward sufficiently to root them in stronger foundations than general observations about French, Russian, and Nazi revolutions and power-grabs. But he captured a moment with his distrust of the totalitarian and top-down imposition of control (he blamed FDR for weakening the moral fiber of the average American working stiff, who from then on expected a New Deal handout).
Bethell dutifully sifts through the lack of data that can be verified prior to 1934 when, ironically in retrospect, Hoffer shows up on Federal records at a labor camp in California--the kind of WPA job he dismissively shunted aside as he became more conservative as a capitulation to laziness and a betrayal of self-reliance which made the immigrant-built nation he may have sneaked across the border into--and suggests he may have "migrated" as the polite term as I write this would put it, into the U.S. from his native Germany. He blurred the little that he claimed true about his youth, and his Bavarian accent rather than the purported Alsatian one of his supposed parents puts doubts into an investigator's mind about the paucity of data and "white lies" Hoffer may have long told.
The narrative has its ups and downs, as Hoffer's life sometimes isn't that exciting, as he remained a bachelor, lived frugally, and channeled his energy into his jottings and index cards of his wide and impressive reading, given he's an autodidact. But the latter part, when Hoffer's attempts at taking on Big Questions such as the separation of God and nature popularized by the Jewish people, the mystery of why humans have not reached perfection unlike a bee, say, but remain creators, restless and flawed, the nature of nature itself in its eerily precise, seemingly randomly evolved mechanism all resound. Bethell leaves us with notes taken by Hoffer from key thinkers--Montaigne was early on a major influence simply because on his way to mine gold in the Sierras for a winter during the Depression, he looked for the thickest tome to purchase--alongside his own reflections, and these examples typify well the talent Hoffer possessed for beavering through thick chunks of erudition, and out of them, the little dams of insights he constructed within the flood of European thought.
And, as Bethell documents increasingly as the study progresses, his distaste for the postures of the Herbert Marcuse-brand of what since then has been called cultural Marxism. For better and worse at Berkeley teaching 1964-72, he literally occupied the ideal perch upon which to witness the drama and the self-pity, the facile spectors of "permissive repression" that the radicals conjured up as class enemies, and the harbingers of what we see half a century-plus all around us as DWM targets.
And the tendency to over-reach, to under-explain, and to fudge subtleties. Even the title of his 1951 debut book's far more about the nature of mass movements (its subtitle) than the title phrase, as Hoffer tended to generalize from his trains of thought, working them over while working on the docks of San Francisco (for arguably a solid income and he got that coveted union job in his mid-forties in the early 1940s only because he had a hernia and couldn't be drafted), rather than push his concepts forward sufficiently to root them in stronger foundations than general observations about French, Russian, and Nazi revolutions and power-grabs. But he captured a moment with his distrust of the totalitarian and top-down imposition of control (he blamed FDR for weakening the moral fiber of the average American working stiff, who from then on expected a New Deal handout).
Bethell dutifully sifts through the lack of data that can be verified prior to 1934 when, ironically in retrospect, Hoffer shows up on Federal records at a labor camp in California--the kind of WPA job he dismissively shunted aside as he became more conservative as a capitulation to laziness and a betrayal of self-reliance which made the immigrant-built nation he may have sneaked across the border into--and suggests he may have "migrated" as the polite term as I write this would put it, into the U.S. from his native Germany. He blurred the little that he claimed true about his youth, and his Bavarian accent rather than the purported Alsatian one of his supposed parents puts doubts into an investigator's mind about the paucity of data and "white lies" Hoffer may have long told.
The narrative has its ups and downs, as Hoffer's life sometimes isn't that exciting, as he remained a bachelor, lived frugally, and channeled his energy into his jottings and index cards of his wide and impressive reading, given he's an autodidact. But the latter part, when Hoffer's attempts at taking on Big Questions such as the separation of God and nature popularized by the Jewish people, the mystery of why humans have not reached perfection unlike a bee, say, but remain creators, restless and flawed, the nature of nature itself in its eerily precise, seemingly randomly evolved mechanism all resound. Bethell leaves us with notes taken by Hoffer from key thinkers--Montaigne was early on a major influence simply because on his way to mine gold in the Sierras for a winter during the Depression, he looked for the thickest tome to purchase--alongside his own reflections, and these examples typify well the talent Hoffer possessed for beavering through thick chunks of erudition, and out of them, the little dams of insights he constructed within the flood of European thought.
And, as Bethell documents increasingly as the study progresses, his distaste for the postures of the Herbert Marcuse-brand of what since then has been called cultural Marxism. For better and worse at Berkeley teaching 1964-72, he literally occupied the ideal perch upon which to witness the drama and the self-pity, the facile spectors of "permissive repression" that the radicals conjured up as class enemies, and the harbingers of what we see half a century-plus all around us as DWM targets.
December 9, 2022
In terms of providing something for the mind to munch on, this book is jam packed. If you are interested in God, thought, philosophy, writing, reading, research, Western Civilization and many other topics, go no further.
This is an astonishing book about an astonishing man.
This is an astonishing book about an astonishing man.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews